Marco Polo was released from prison (there must have been mourning in the palaces of Genoa) and returned to Venice at the end of a year.  Sometimes hereafter his name occurs in the records of Venice, as he moves about on his lawful occasions.[34] In 1305 we find ’Nobilis Marchus Polo Milioni’ standing surety for a wine smuggler; in 1311 he is suing a dishonest agent who owes him money on the sale of musk (he, Marco, had seen the musk deer in its lair); and in 1323 he is concerned in a dispute about a party wall.  We know too, from his will, that he had a wife named Donata, and three daughters, Fantina, Bellela, and Moreta.  Had he loved before, under the alien skies where his youth was spent, some languid, exquisite lady of China, or hardy Tartar maid?  Had he profited himself from the strange marriage customs of Tibet, of which he remarks (with one of his very rare gleams of humour), ’En cele contree aurent bien aler les jeume de seize anz en vingt quatre’?  Had Fantina, Bellela, and Moreta half-brothers, flying their gerfalcons at the quails by the shores of the ‘White Lake’ where the Khan hunted, and telling tales of the half legendary father, who sailed away for ever when they were boys in the days of Kublai Khan?  These things we cannot know, nor can we ever guess whether he regretted that only daughters sprang from his loins in the city of the lagoons, and no Venetian son to go venturing again to the far-distant country where assuredly he had left a good half of his heart.  Perhaps he talked of it sometimes to Peter, his Tartar servant, whom he freed at his death ’from all bondage as completely as I pray God to release mine own soul from all sin and guilt’.  Some have thought that he brought Peter the Tartar with him from the East, and the thought is a pleasant one; but it is more likely that he bought him in Italy, for the Venetians were inveterate slave-owners, and captive Tartars were held of all the slaves the strongest and best.  So his life passed; and in 1324 Marco Polo died, honoured much by his fellow-citizens, after making a will which is still preserved in the library of St Mark’s.

A characteristic story of his death-bed is related by a Dominican friar, one Jacopo of Acqui, who wrote some time later.  ’What he told in the book,’ says Jacopo, ’was not as much as he had really seen, because of the tongues of detractors, who being ready to impose their own lies on others, are over hasty to set down as lies what they in their perversity disbelieve or do not understand.  And because there are many great and strange things in that book, which are reckoned past all credence, he was asked by his friends on his death-bed to correct the book, by removing everything that went beyond the facts.  To which his reply was that he had not told one half of what he had really seen.’[35] How well one can see that last indignant flash of the dying observer, who in the long years of his youth had taken notes of strange tribes and customs for the wise and gracious